On the Christian Religion

Petrus, then, my pious progenitor, nurtured me from tender years so that I might be able to philosophize, using his own wealth. You, recently, wishing to combine the study of philosophizing in me—as much as you were able, just as you have been accustomed to do in those few others—with the duty of piety, have decorated your Marsilio Ficino with the priesthood, and indeed honorably so. Would that I had never failed nor might ever fail myself, since the favor and help of God himself, and of my physician, has never been lacking. But in order to win divine grace more for myself, to gratify you, and not to fail myself, as soon as I was initiated into the rites of the priesthood, I composed the work On the Christian Religion, which indeed I decided should be dedicated to you, the author of this my profession, and the principal student of wisdom as well as a cultivator of piety.

We see that individual gifts of the human race appear, at least in certain animals according to a certain likeness, with the exception of religion. The brutes show no sign of religion of their own accord, so that the raising of the mind toward God, the King of Heaven, is as proper to us as the raising of the body toward the sky, and such divine worship is almost as natural to men as neighing is to horses or barking to dogs. But if someone should curiously assert that some beasts occasionally venerate celestial things—which I believe least of all—the Platonists would reply that such beasts either do something else when they seem to be honoring celestial things, or if by chance they do honor them, they nevertheless do not know what they are doing, or if they do know, they are also participants in intelligence and immortality. But in truth, to return to our proposal, man, the most perfect animal, thrives most in that property by which he is both perfected and distinguished from lower things, by which he is joined to the most perfect, that is, to divine things.